Feisty Four Cylinder: Aaron Gregory’s 7-Second Eagle Talon

Horsepower is measured by different means — it can be a dyno number, or in the case of drag racing, it’s often the mile-per-hour you’re lighting the boards with. It takes a fair amount of horsepower to go almost 200 mph, imagine doing it with just dour cylinders whiling covering the 1/4-mile in seven seconds? Aaron Gregory did just that, and he also earned the fastest 1G DSM record along the way.

The Eagle Talon was introduced in 1990 as a joint project between Chrysler and Mitsubishi. These cars came from the factory as front-wheel-drive or all-wheel-drive models with a turbocharged 4G63 engine. The cars were known as 1G DSMs and quickly gained a cult following because of the performance they produced. Domestic high-performance enthusiasts that didn’t know about these cars would potentially find themselves on the losing end of a stoplight dual on the streets if they weren’t careful thanks to how well these cars responded to simple modifications.

Gregory’s Talon is about as nasty as they come — the billet 4G63 engine generates over 1,200 horsepower to the tires while revving to almost 11,000 rpm as 80-pounds of boost, along with a 150 shot of nitrous fill the cylinders. In this video from TalonTSi97, we see Gregory set the 1GSM record with a 7.09 pass at 199 MPH, nearly resetting the overall DSM record held by Boostin Performance’s “Red Demon” 2G Talon.

After that record pass, Gregory was ready to swing for the 6-second barrier and looked to be on his way until turbo failure struck. The 7.09-seconds pass will stand as a record for a while, and it’s impressive that Gregory can coax this much performance out of a small-displacement inline four-cylinder engine.